Doxastic voluntarism is a philosophical view that people elect their own
beliefs
A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take i ...
;
that is, that subjects have a certain amount of control over what they believe, such that a subject may choose whether or not to believe a certain thing.
This philosophical view is derived from a branch of
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
known as
doxastic logic Doxastic logic is a type of logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs.
The term ' derives from the Ancient Greek (''doxa'', "opinion, belief"), from which the English term ''doxa'' ("popular opinion or belief") is also borrowed. Typically, a d ...
; however, as opposed to other philosophical views on belief, doxastic voluntarism claims each human agent as the author of their own beliefs. Doxastic voluntarism falls under the branch of philosophy known as
ethics of belief The ethics of belief refers to a cluster of related issues that focus on standards of rational belief, intellectual excellence, and conscientious belief-formation. Among the questions addressed in the field are:
* Are there standards of some sort ( ...
.
Philosophers distinguish two types of doxastic voluntarism: direct doxastic voluntarism and indirect doxastic voluntarism. Direct doxastic voluntarism being that the person has control over some of their beliefs (e.g. an individual changes his belief from theism to atheism) and indirect doxastic voluntarism is that the person has unintended control, through voluntary intermediate actions, over some of their beliefs (e.g. researching and unintentionally evaluating the evidence).
References
See also
*
The Ethics of Belief at the ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''
Ethics
Belief
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